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Interested
Joined: 10 Feb 2003
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 Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 2:18 am Post subject: What if women ruled the banks? |
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What if women ruled the banks?
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| When Harriet Harman hinted that the Government might use equality legislation to force the appointment of more women managers in the banks that we, the taxpayers, now own she certainly ruffled some � mainly male � feathers. |
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But scary or not, there is a chance that the minister could be on to a good thing. The reputation of bankers and financiers is at a low at present, partly because of the madly competitive way that they exposed the institutions they ran to higher and higher risks in pursuit of expansion of profit.
And, of course, women are generally not as competitive as men.
So let us suppose that it had been Freda Goodwin rather than Sir Fred Goodwin running RBS, or Jane, not Sir James Crosby at HBOS, or Eve instead of Adam Applegarth at Northern Rock. Would the reputation of Britain's financial sector be higher or lower than it is now?
This is not a wholly subjective question. There is some science that informs the answer, because of work by a team from Cambridge University who measured testosterone levels in a small group of male City of London traders at 11am and 4pm on a number of days, and matched the results to the same days' levels of profit or loss. They found that testosterone levels were significantly higher on days when traders made more than their average profit.
Financiers are like sportsmen, the study suggested. On days when they have testosterone coursing through their veins, their confidence rises and they produce the results expected of them. But the research pointed to a downside to trading floor frenzy. Too much testosterone can be addictive, driving over excited males to take more and more risky decisions.
John Coates, a research fellow in neuroscience at Cambridge, was on Wall Street during the dotcom bubble. "Many traders at this time displayed manic behaviour and a sense of infallibility," he said. "Equally telling was that women appeared relatively unaffected. Both facts implicated a chemical such as testosterone."
Writing in the Financial Times, he warned that in times of crisis like the current recession, another chemical, cortisol, was also affecting traders who "appear cool and unemotional � but beneath the poker face is an endocrine system on fire." That system can drive traders to the other extreme during bad times, putting them in a condition of "learned helplessness", when they are unwilling to take any risks at all. Having more women and older men around could have a calming effect.
Trevor Phillips, who heads the Equalities Commission, believes that putting more women in charge would go a long way towards restoring public confidence. "In an economic recession, some may be tempted to take their foot off the gas when it comes to tackling inequality, asking if we can afford it. But the truth is, tackling the decades old inequality faced by women should be at the heart of efforts to restore business reputation."
Muhammad Yunus, among the world's most renowned and respected bankers, whose business has thrived in the current recession, has views about women and money which sound as if they are taken from some feminist manifesto when they actually borne out of experience.
Yunus founded the Grameen Bank 26 years ago, to give the poor of Bangladesh access to small loans which they could use to pull themselves out of poverty. The business became the model for a worldwide movement to relieve poverty through microcredit, and earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
The bank started with the principle that women should have the same right to credit as men, and reckoned they would divide their business about 50-50 between the sexes. But experience taught him that although men and women were equally reliable when it came to repaying loans, the loans advanced to women had a more beneficial social effect. "At the beginning we had no idea that this sort of thing would emerge, but it's so clear," he said in a recent lecture. "Women have a longer vision. So we asked another question. We said: 'What's so good about 50-50? � let's change it, because we have got so much social impact.' Quickly, we moved from 50, to 60, to 70, to 90 per cent. Today we have seven and a half million borrowers; 97 per cent are women." |
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3MB
Joined: 26 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 5:07 am Post subject: |
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| If women ran the banks they would spend all the money on bags and shoes. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 7:58 am Post subject: |
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Women as morally superior again. I prefer to deal with realities. And the reality is that if women ran banks, then it would be women such as M. Thatcher, J. Kirkpatrick, H. Clinton, C. Rice, M. Bachelet...
And speaking of Chilean women, I actually knew a woman who ran a bank: M. Elena Ovalle. She sits on Chile's central bank, the equivalent of our federal reserve board. And she was a first-rate capitalist banker. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 9:49 am Post subject: |
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What a horribly thought out piece.
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| women are generally not as competitive as men |
Alright, lets assume this is true (w/o anyone getting the idea that I believe this; the personality trait 'competitive' is amorphous and I think broad enough to encompass the perhaps more subtle way that many women do compete).
Even if women are generally not as competitive as men, does this mean therefore that all women are not competitive? Certainly it does not. There are women, and not a few, who are every bit as competitive as the most competitive men out there.
So the question is, what kind of women will be selected as bankers?
If the idea is to find bankers more cautious, more conservative, more responsible, set up an evaluation system screening for those traits, NOT FOR GENDER. |
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Fox
Joined: 04 Mar 2009
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| Posted: Fri May 08, 2009 9:08 pm Post subject: |
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I wonder why more of these long visioned, wise, and reliable women aren't starting banks and drastically outcompeting male-run banks with their decision making skills. I mean, if their choices are really so much better that it's justifiable deliberately loaning to them as opposed to men at a ratio of 97 to 3, surely we'd see something. This is especially true given the existence of quite a few interests groups whose goal is to support the advancement of women and only women.
Alternatively, the article could just be filled with pro-female sexist rhetoric. |
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Ilsanman
Joined: 15 Aug 2003
Location: Bucheon, Korea
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| Posted: Sun May 10, 2009 2:34 am Post subject: |
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Damn, you beat me to it.
| 3MB wrote: |
| If women ran the banks they would spend all the money on bags and shoes. |
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Interested
Joined: 10 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Fri May 15, 2009 9:25 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| Women as morally superior again. |
That's your own interpretation of it. It wasn't mine. |
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